Zionism

Reading Unvocalized Texts as a Way of Testing One's Active Knowledge of Ancient Hebrew

This is a guest post by Randall Buth. I thank him for
permission to relay it to the readers of this blog. Randall interacts with this
post in particular. The spur for his comments came from similar ones made by another Hebrew
teacher, Sharon Alley, who happens to be his daughter. The situation reminds me of a quip which Markus Barth, son of Karl Barth, repeated on more than one occasion: "I and the father are not one."

Reading unvocalized texts is a great way for
a student to discover what level of internalization they may already have. At
the Biblical Language Center, we
include some unvocalized texts for students to read to see 'where they are' in
our first year materials. But we have come to conclude that it is a poor
learning technique. We now think that the modern Hebrew Israeli ulpans are
making a big mistake by using primarily unvocalized texts with early levels of
Hebrew learners. We have noticed many adult learners reach fairly high
communicable levels of modern Hebrew with a rather sloppy articulation of word
shapes and vocalizations.

Modern ulpan teachers like to point out that
Israeli children all learn from unvocalized texts. By and large that is true.
But the comparison hides a problem. Israeli children already know how to
correctly pronounce words they see written without vowels. They have already
internalized the basic language and basic few thousand words of vocabulary. Not
so the foreign learner. They typically try to read unvocalized texts with a
background of only a few hundred words and find themselves spending long hours
searching through dictionaries to get the vocalization correct -- or they just
ignore the correct vocalization. It they can communicate with enough mistakes
in a sentence they will not be corrected by fluent speakers. Who wants to
correct three separate mis-vocalizations in one sentence? Those learners end up
with a sloppy or skewed language, and it is attributed to their being
'foreigners' rather than poor pedagogy.

My strong recommendation is that beginning
Hebrew students work with vocalized texts until they have internalized the
basic morphological structures of the language. Even at that level, they would
be greatly helped by having any new vocabulary vocalized. One possible approach
would be to produce materials that assume a basic 2000-3000 word vocabulary,
all vocalized at lower levels. Advanced material would only vocalize words that
are not predictable by morphological pattern and not included in the first 2000
words.

I agree on the importance of being
comfortable in reading unvocalized texts. If a student wants to learn biblical
Hebrew, then they should not stop actively studying/ learning until they can
comfortably[1] read
both a biblical Hebrew text, AND commentaries written on those texts in
unvocalized Hebrew. Until they reach that level their language competence does
not really pass muster.[2] It
falls short of a professional standard that would be expected in most any other
literary field.

[1] Naturally, 'comfortably,' means texts that do not have
inherent diachronological obscurities. There are many places where no one knows
exactly what the Hebrew text is saying/said.

[2] I've met many a PhD whose language skills mis-produce
and mis-predict biblical Hebrew, all the while claiming to 'control the
grammar'. the biggest danger is when the Dr. is unaware of the mis-firings. A
couple of thousand hours of use of the language would have provided this
background, but our current pedagogies do not provide that for PhD students at
any level. Their only practical alternative is to became fluent in modern
Hebrew and conversant with the whole history of the language. Theoretically,
this is also necessary because the biblical language is so limited (7000+ words)
that fluency and natural use would be rather difficult to provide all the way
to advanced levels without leaving the realm of BH-only.

Yea - I am not out to lunch yet. I am glad to see this for I find that my guesses about vocalization are weak. I am also stuck on the multiplicity of transcriptions I come across in books. A learner of Hebrew needs to read in three different forms at least, especially with books that donot deal with the Hebrew character set.

For the record, I started Lambdin again a little over a year ago. I have had about 30 hours of introductory instruction from the prayer book, and probably about 700 hours of self-study (1-2 hours a day over the past 15 months). It is a slow process.

For both comments I would add one important principle that was not addressed above:

reading needs to build on a fluent core of the language that includes listening and speaking.

'Reading only' will not record in the same part of the brain that natural language is recorded in. This last point is an educated guess that I expect to see confirmed during the next decade with brain-scan technology. Psycholinguistic studies have shown that even Chinese speakers access phonetic information in their brain while reading Chinese pictographs. Qal vaHomer [a fortiori], languages with more transparent orthographies.

Bottom line: beginning students need to build a listening/speaking fluency if they want to reach advanced levels of internalization in the language, if they want to develop high-level reading skills from within the language. You are welcome to check out opportunities at www.biblicalulpan.org.

In learning to read Hebrew a student is advised to do lots of listening and speaking in a live communicative environment. This is more than simple memory or listening to set texts, but both of those can/should be included.

And yes, second-language speakers make a fine environment, we don't have any first-language speakers. Related dialects help, too. Any internalized morphology of modern Hebrew transfers 100% to ancient Hebrew, something that cannot be said for other modern languages.

It is clear that readers of ancient Hebrew need lots of listening and speaking to become truly proficient in the language.

Many teachers of ancient Hebrew, of course, lack the requisite skills to make the listening and speaking dimensions come alive for their students.

It reminds of the situation I became familiar with while in Italy. The principal of the liceo linguistico (a kind of high school which concentrates on modern languages) in Scicli where I was pastor begged me to go on staff and help teach English. My job was to speak to the class in (American) English and elicit speech from them.

Why couldn't the regular teacher of the class do this? Because she wasn't trained to do so. For her English degree at the University of Palermo, she learned more about Shakespeare than I will ever know. But she wasn't expected or required to speak fluent English. Did she have English professors in a position to test her in English fluency? Perhaps not.

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